Louise is a 63-year old widow who has just retired. Louise owns her home, has no debt, and lives on Social Security payments, a pension, interest from her Certificates of Deposit, and a passbook savings account at a local bank. Two of her CDs are due to mature, and interest rates have dropped. Louise would like an investment that will provide more in monthly income than her CDs will at the new lower interest rate. She is concerned about meeting her expenses if her income drops, and she is risk averse. Her representative recommends ABC Equity Asset Allocation Fund to Louise. The fund has had outstanding performance over the past 3 years and is managed by a well-known money manager. Is the representative's recommendation suitable for this client

Monthly price data for mdltx and ekwax from yahoo finance is contained in the excel spreadsheet for this exercise. there are 37 months of price data for the period from september 2009 to september 2012. (note: these prices already incorporate dividend payments.) the 36 monthly returns for each fund are also provided. calculate average (arithmetic) monthly return and standard deviation for each fund. you can use the excel functions average, stdev to derive these stats. annualize these statistics. use the correl function in excel to derive the correlation coefficient between the two sets of returns. (annual correlation is the same as monthly correlation. hence, no need to annualize this stat.) using the annualized statistics derived in step 1, compute the expected return and standard deviation for portfolios containing from 0% to 100% mdltx (and 100% to 0% ekwax) by 10% increments. graph the resulting portfolios. based on your analysis, is there any potential benefit to diversification across these two funds? explain. of the 11 portfolios you graphed, which are efficient?